Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon (2015)

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If you’re a scholar of comedy, “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead:
The Story of the National Lampoon,” a concise doc about the founding, life,
thriving, and death of the '70s-defining satirical magazine, is likely a
must-see. It’s an engaging and entertaining film, filled with funny anecdotes
expertly related. It contains some notable “get” interviews. The magazine’s
reticent co-founder, Henry Beard, the buttoned-down superego to his Wildman
cohort Doug Kenney, appears on camera throughout, which was a surprise to me:
Beard, while still an active writer and editor, has kept a downright reclusive
public profile in the years since the magazine folded.

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Of course, if you are a scholar of comedy, you probably
already own the coffee table book, edited by former Lampoon contributor Rick
Meyerowitz, also called “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead,” which tells the story of
the magazine and some of its most notorious staffers. That book also features
generous samplings of the magazine’s work, which the movie, directed by Douglas
Tirola, can only offer piecemeal, or mutated via animation, a very popular
tactic in documentaries nowadays. What the movie offers that the book can’t are
exciting clips from the Lampoon’s stage show, which featured performances by
future screen comedy icons such as Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Christopher
Guest, Gilda Radner, and many more. The movie does an excellent job of
chronicling how those stage shows gave rise to “Saturday Night Live,” which
created a huge talent drain at the magazine, and how the film “National
Lampoon’s Animal House,” while a huge unexpected monster hit that vindicated the
insight of the magazine staffers who conceived it, also diffused the energies of
some of the magazine’s visionaries.

These chronicles are interspersed with a lot of things you
see too much of these days in docs about cultural phenomenons: interviews with celebrities
who tell you why the cultural phenom under examination here was really
important and stuff, animated recreations of particularly outrageous anecdotes, and poignancy. The story of Kenney, who died in a hiking accident in Hawaii in
1980, is played out like something out of a Fitzgerald tale with longer hair,
while the passing of anger-management failure Michael O’Donoghue elicits a bit
less in terms of warm sentiment.

As watchable as the movie is, it’s an almost relentlessly incurious history. The founders of the
magazine, and its admirers, go on at some length about what outsiders Beard and Kenney were as they
tried to pitch their spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon to Madison Avenue in the
late 1960s. Yes, you read that right: the Harvard Lampoon. No one can be
bothered to point out that an “outsider” coming from Harvard is still, um,
coming from Harvard. The doc is similarly unconcerned with the fact that the
magazine was by and large not just a boy’s club but also a white boy’s club. It’s not as if the Lampoon
didn’t butt heads with feminist forces during its actual existence, and the
canard about women not being funny is far from dead. So it would have been nice
to hear from, say, writer Anne Beatts about this, as entertaining as her
anecdote about getting into the mag by dint of having been a male staffer’s
girlfriend. And while a few black performers are seen in stills from the
Lampoon’s stage show, the overall aesthetic that comes across in the movie is
so almost relentlessly white that one almost has to ask: could Beard, P.J.
O’Rourke, Sean Kelly, or any of these guys, even ever conceive of having an
African-American writer in on an edit meeting? Except nobody making this movie
did. Which, admittedly, doesn’t amount to anything like a massive social
injustice, unless, maybe you stop for a minute and look hard at what the
magazine was satirizing.

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